Blog Comments & Posts

I think there are certain places where it is useful depending on what your primary keywords are. If you run a tattoo website, it may be important to try to optimize for common misspelling such as tatoo or tatto, since those are primary terms high on the keyword pyramid that can easily be misspelled. But I see no reason to optimize for misspellings that might appear more towards the long tail.

If I do try to optimize for misspellings, I'll almost only do it in ugc areas, such as product reviews for ecommerce sites. I think if you have too many of them in the body throughout your site it looks unprofessional and could be a signal of a low quality page.

Thanks for the good information here. Another tool that I often utilize is the google suggest scraper tool which also provides lots of different variations of keywords. I find it useful early on in the research process.

While I don't doubt that there is a positive correlation between your bounce rate and your rankings, I think your ranking fluctuations are more likely caused by changes to your local webgraph. As links and domains age, rankings are more likely to stabilize, which I think is what you're seeing with your mature sites.

I personally believe that if Google was to place enough weight on query specific bounce rates to influence rankings (which I don't believe at this time), they'd be more likely to factor it into high volume queries where they have more data and the clicks (as an aggregate) are tougher to be gamed due to sheer volume. For lesser or mildly competitive terms where there is less traffic and clicks, I would think bounce rate would be less of a quality signal (and therefore less of a factor) due to a smaller data set that is easier to be influenced by an individual, similar to what happens in Wordtracker when you try to get numbers on 'barber' and it shows more searches have been done on 'Podunk Iowa barber' than on 'barber.' In addition, I think click stats (click through rate, bounce rate, time on site, etc.) would also be less valuable the further down you go on any SERPs page since for all queries the top 3 get a disproportionate amount of the clicks.

I think if you were to build topical links slowly from the beginning to get your site integrated into 'the neighborhood,' your site will build trust and rankings quicker and your backlink profile would as you said 'overpower the bounce rate statistic.'

*Please disregard South Park joke below*

Then again, it's worthless to debate algorithm specifics. We both could be completely wrong and the rankings could be determined by the same Manatees that are responsible for all the Family Guy jokes.

I don't think there is anything new here. In February of 04, Amit Singhal, one of Googles head search engineers, gave a presentation in which he said Google had click data and it was an 'incredibly noisy' signal (page 32 of the PDF). I'd assume that since then they have come up with better filters for click data but I wouldn't attribute any recent changes to bounce rate or click data alone, since this is a data point they've been tracking for a while with access to Analtyics and the large number of people that have Google Toolbar installed. I also don't think Google would place significant weight on any factor that is entirely human controlled.